Abstract
Understanding the complex physics of high-pressure arc discharges, important for many applications, is challenging; work in decades past was limited by the available laser sources and digital processing capabilities. The authors apply spatial carrier-wave interferometry to measure heavy-particle and electron densities independently in a circuit breaker arc, at high resolution. Their observations shed light on the process of current interruption, and will permit the calibration of computational fluid dynamics simulations used to study such arcs.
Highlights
Electrical arcs have been the subject of extensive scientific research since Franklin’s [1] work in this field in the 18th century
To illustrate the processing of the interferograms, all of the steps involved in translating the measured phase shift into density and temperature profiles are presented here for a measurement made at a stagnation pressure of 10.7 bar and a current of 100 A
The measured phase shift after unwrapping is shown in Fig. 8(a); x 1⁄4 0 represents the axis of the arc, and y 1⁄4 0 is close to the end of the hollow contact and marks the approximate location of the stagnation point
Summary
Electrical arcs have been the subject of extensive scientific research since Franklin’s [1] work in this field in the 18th century. The complex physics of the arc has not been completely understood and cannot be modeled in a simple way. One of the key processes that defines the density, temperature, and conductivity profiles of an arc is radiation transport, a topic that has been the subject of numerous theoretical and computational studies including Refs. There are only limited experimental studies of the arc profile [7,8,9,10,11,12], the high-resolution, spatially resolved measurements needed to validate numerical models of the arc. In a recent survey of the field of thermal plasma modeling, Gleizes [13] emphasizes the importance of experimental validation and the limited number of benchmarks available
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